


Changes

by E350tb



Series: Eternal Connie [1]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Immortality, crazy theory time, dodgy medical science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-18 04:14:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11283534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/E350tb/pseuds/E350tb
Summary: Little by little, something inside Connie changes.





	Changes

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is sort of my mad Steven Universe theory.

**Changes**

_Changes are taking_  
_The pace I’m going through_  
_Turn and face the strange_

When she first accidentally swallowed Steven’s spit, that fine spring day shortly before summer began, Connie Maheswaran had had no idea that her life had been changed forever.

Most of the time, Steven’s healing powers worked mostly in the same way as his mother’s – while they healed skin, bone or gem, they didn’t usually fundamentally alter the subject’s physiology. (Lion and Lars were exceptions, of course, but they hadn’t so much been healed as they had been revived from the dead.) In those cases, of course, tears and spit had been administered _externally_ , over the skin or gem in question. Nobody had thought to _ingest_ them; that would have been more than a little bit weird.

When the healing spit cured Connie’s eyesight, both thought that was the end of it. But deep inside Connie’s body, a trace amount of Steven’s DNA – and by extension Rose’s – was quietly absorbed into her system. It didn’t change her in any way, save one.

It allowed her to fuse. And that would be the real leap down the rabbit hole.

Steven and Connie never thought about the physical effects of fusing into Stevonnie – Steven was half-human, so it made sense that he could fuse with other humans, right? But every time _they_ became _I_ , Connie’s physiology changed. She never knew it, but she was becoming a little less human and a little more of something else.

In the end, it was her mother that caught on first.

Doctor Priyanka Maheswaran didn’t treat her own daughter – she preferred to send her to her colleague, Doctor West, who she believed was free of bias. West was more than a little eccentric (some joked that he raised the dead in his spare time) but he was an expert physician, and one day he found something a tad _off_ in a routine check-up. He sent it straight to Priyanka – sure, that violated doctor-patient confidentiality, but he figured she’d want to see it. Nobody but them would have noticed it, but Connie’s white blood cells seemed to look a little strange.

Priyanka followed this up immediately; she had West do a blood test and sent the sample to a friend in a lab up in Empire City. She feared her daughter might have some kind of anaemia, and wanted to make sure she could treat it before it became a serious issue.

The lab friend sent a quick reply. They asked for more samples – they had a wild theory but needed to see if Connie’s blood cells changed over time.

For the next six months, under the guise of a B12 deficiency, West took Connie’s blood and Priyanka sent it north. Finally, the lab friend had seen enough to confident of their theory. They asked for a conference call with Priyanka and her husband, Doug.

Connie, they said, seemed to be changing in a way nobody in the lab had ever seen. Far from being harmful, the changes to Connie’s cells seemed to be making them far more effective – her immune system was the best any of them had ever seen. Further, the cells in her blood, did not seem to be degrading, and while that had led to concerns that they were cancerous, no traces of the terrible affliction had been found.

Stranger still were the changes to Connie’s DNA. While most of it was certainly that of a human, the lab friend estimated that about twelve to thirteen percent was something else.

As Priyanka listened to them talk, the other shoe dropped. The Gems, Steven, the fusion – they had done something to her child.

After the call ended, Priyanka’s first instinct was to break the Crystal Gems like twigs, as can be expected of an angry mother. Once she’d calmed down, she and Doug resolved to talk it over with the Gems and Greg – Connie and Steven didn’t need to be told just yet. They stopped at the hospital, grabbed blood samples from Doctor West (who decided not to question this) and drove straight to the Temple.

Garnet and Pearl had no answers – this had never happened before. After a lot of discussion and more than a little shouting, it was decided that Pearl would take the samples to Peridot, and they’d see if they could work out what was going on. Meanwhile, Greg would take Steven to Doctor West for a blood test, so that they’d have something to compare the samples with.

The results came in on Connie’s sixteenth birthday. It turned out to be one heck of a birthday surprise.

Steven’s cells, it turned out, did not decay – ever. It was probable that he’d live as long as any gem (and no gem had ever been recorded as dying of natural causes). They were also only _partially_ physical, with much of his genetic makeup provided by hard light from his gem. This wasn’t that much of a shock to the gems (although it was a bit for Greg). What _was_ a shock was that Connie’s cells were far more similar to Steven’s than to a normal human.

It didn’t make her a genetic sibling to Steven, no more than one Rose Quartz could be called the sibling of another, but it _did_ mean that she was no longer a human, strictly speaking. And if Steven was going to live potentially forever…

So, what now? Would a new Rose Quartz gem form on Connie? (Maybe, but don’t bet on it, Garnet had said.) How would they explain this to her family, her friends, the Feds, Steven? How did you tell your child that they might be immortal?

Priyanka and Doug ultimately decided that they’d tell her when she turned eighteen. Let her worry about it later.

Fate stood in the way.

It was a perfectly normal morning. Doug was just making himself a coffee before heading off to work, while Priyanka was just about to head out the door herself. It was all routine – Connie was trusted to get to high school herself these days, so she was usually still upstairs when they left. So it was a little unusual when she came down the stairs that morning, looking more than a little anxious.

“Mom, Dad,” she said, her voice slightly halting, “I…there’s something I need to tell you…”

She lifted her shirt up over her bellybutton, and Priyanka burst into tears.

**Author's Note:**

> And that's a wrap. I'm thinking of writing more in this universe, but we'll see.  
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
